The Great British Baking Show, it's a reality tv show just like all the others that just happens to feature cooking right? It's a fun romp through British culture, with plenty of British humor but not fundamentally different from things like RuPaul's Drag Race or Project Runway right?
Wrong. so wrong.
No, it's not different because it is more inclusive or more feminist or because they brought on new judges who are "edgy". No, it's because of something very much foundational to the show: something built into the show's design. Something incredibly radical, but which goes unnoticed. It's not the cakes and pies and breads. It's something much more basic than that. It's the underlying ethic of compassion that the show's incentives are set up to maintain. There is no room for the greedy and ruthless competitor in this show: tactics like lying, cheating and stealing are not rewarded. Honorable conduct is enforced by the very structure of the contest and by the behavior of the judges. Not through fear, but through the simple fact that you cannot lie to Paul and Mary. If you skimped on something, or did something wrong and tried to cover it up they will notice. Your mistakes are not something you can hide from, you must own them. But they are also not something to be ashamed of: the only thing to be ashamed of is falling short of your personal best. We have an irrational fear of being seen as less than perfect: but when we are put in a situation where hiding our flaws is impossible it does not turn out to be as bad as we expect.
Yes, this is a show where someone has to go home at the end of every episode, and this is a show with a single winner. But, that's not in itself a bad thing. This is because each episode is broken down into three contests: the signature challenge, the technical challenge and the showstopper challenge. The show also never has fewer than three contestants (thus, one contestant is always safe from threat): and does not rely on the fact that someone can be sent home for it's drama. The drama is instead found in whether the contestants can complete the challenge they have been set in the time alotted, and what they will do if something goes wrong. Contestants are not punished for bad luck: they are punished for not creatively dealing with bad luck. More importantly, the judges genuinely want the contestants to do well. An experimental idea that fails is "unfortunate", not "naughty". The winner is not likely to be the person who was the most impressive in the first week: in fact, more often than not that person doesn't make it to the final. The winner is going to be the person who can learn over the course of the whole show, from their own mistakes, from the other contestants, and even from their successes. The point of this show is to inspire people to bake, not to scare people off it. It's to put on display Britain's baking tradition, and to track it's evolution in real time. Paul and Mary don't simply rate each bake: they give nuanced and detailed feedback. How the contestant responds to that feedback, affects whether they get sent home or not. Mouthing off to the judges gets you nowhere, though that obviously doesn't stop some guys from trying it. But although Paul Hollywood may be fit and dress like a 20-something, he's not and he has the gray hair to prove it. He knows how to deal with overeager alpha males, he knows all the tricks men like that use. Not that this happens often, it's a show about baking after all.
But, Paul isn't there to scare you. There was a contestant once who put his failed signature challenge in the trash, because it didn't work the way he'd hoped. Instead of getting angry, Paul just looked at him with genuine sadness. He said: "why did you do that? If I can't see it, I can't help you." This contestant had failed to understand what the GBBS is about: learning. It's about learning new recipes, learning new ways to make old recipes. It's about trying new things, and sometimes not succeeding. Destroying your mistakes means you can't learn from them, and indeed means that you aren't interested in learning from them. Many would even say, it defeats the purpose of baking. Art is not about doing things perfectly, because perfection is by definition unattainable. Art is about doing your best, and presenting it even when it has glaring flaws. It is about making something in reaction to the world around you, and about taking in the reactions to your art. Baking is art, and that is the point of the Great British Baking Show.
That is why this show is radical: it is taking something which for centuries has been overlooked and undervalued, and revealing it for what it truly is. Baking is art and a baker is an artist in their heart: just because their medium is food does not mean it is any less artistic than painting or music or drama. The Great British Baking Show is a piece of art about art, about the process of creating art which is itself a work of art: a drama that usually unfolds behind closed doors and is a secret carried in a single person's heart. It is about the high of artistic success, and the sadness of artistic failure: and it is about the ordinary people who are extraordinary artists. Baking is an art that anyone can engage in, without needing special equipment. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the first arts humanity ever engaged in: the clay oven is one simple step up from the spit over an open fire. But because it was an art that was by definition domestic, and the role of the woman, it was overlooked. It was then undervalued by feminists, who charged into a new world of factory-made meals without considering the consequences to individual and social health. The point of the Great British Baking Show is to celebrate British culture: and the overlooked people who are shaping it's future. The contestants on this show are not just hobbyists: they are the heirs of a long and complex tradition, practicing it in a world that sets up numerous obstacles for people like them.
A culture is not something you have. It is not something you can put in a box and jealously guard. It is something you practice. It is something you do. Because it is something that you do, it will naturally evolve. Only a culture that has ceased to exist can be pinned down and separated distinctly from what happened around it. But cultures rarely cease to exist, precisely because they are something that people do. Cultures can outlive the people who created them, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Constantinople fell in 450 BC, yet the culture of the Eastern Roman Empire survived through the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Rus: not the blood descendants of the Romans who created it, but the tribe of Germanic warriors they hired as bodyguards who fled northwards taking their customs, their religion and their artifacts. Empires rise and fall, but cultures live on.
The Achaemenid Empire fell, and the Hellenistic era ended, the Ottoman Empire rose and fell in it's turn. But if Cyrus the Great were brought to modern Iran he would know his own people, and they would know him. He would recognize the tongue they speak, the clothes they wear, the government they have, the buildings they build, and the food they eat: how they think and act on a daily basis, especially the actions they don't think about. If Shi'ism was explained to him, he would chuckle: knowing that of course his countrymen would create this sect, since it is precisely how he himself would modify Islam. If he were told of the Iranian revolution, he would not be surprised. But he would be equally unsurprised to hear that now the revolution is unpopular. He would laugh, and clap his hands in pride if shown the Twitter war between President Trump and Iran's present leaders: glad to know that his countrymen are still the consummate diplomats and patient masters of strategy that he knew and loved. Much has changed for Iran since his time, but the Iranians have not essentially changed.
Culture is born from the hearth fire, not from the palace. A truth the ancient Greeks recognized. As Hesiod said: "Hestia has no temples, and yet is the greatest of all the gods." Hestia is not a goddess of cooking or even of the home: she is the embodiment of Greek culture. Without her, none of the other gods would exist. Culture starts at home, with the necessities of life: the food, the tools, the clothing and the dynamics of family. Culture starts in the kitchen: when mom opens the fridge and discovers sixteen eggs, six containers of half-eaten veggies, one sausage and two quarts of cream. So was born the Christmas frittata in my house. It is the actions we take when we are not thinking: the things we think of as normal and mundane. We love to watch Koreans eat meals because the way they eat is so different from how we do. The same is true in reverse. They aren't thinking about their eating process any more than any of us would.
We create and practice culture every moment of every day. We simply are not usually conscious of it. What something like the Great British Baking Show does is it makes the unconscious, conscious. Which is what any good piece of art should do. Yet, that is something incredibly radical in today's world of deliberate obfuscation, where people of European heritage are told lies every day about what culture is, and about theirs in particular. This is not being done by some shadowy cabal of outsiders, Jews or Muslims or blacks etc. It is being done by other Europeans, and it is the method being used to control Europe. Culture is a threat to industrialization, to corporate capitalism. Oh, the veneer of it is fine of course: the symbols of it, packaged neatly and ripped out of their context. But culture in it's entirety is a threat, precisely because it originates from outside of the corporation and it's evolution cannot be controlled by the corporation. Fascism is the mechanism for corporate control of culture. And that is why The Great British Baking show is radical: because it gives the middle finger to the corporation. This is a show about amateur bakers, who circumvent the factories and create things that they cannot. The mistakes and flaws and even collapses are not "naughty" they are something to be celebrated, because they are the byproducts of the creative process: the process that this show puts from and center. It shows that the soul of Britain is still in the kitchen, despite the industrialization and then post-industrialization of the country. The contestants on the Great British Baking Show are the people who will determine it's future, not the Prime Minister or the Queen.
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